


clutching at emptiness

by avocadodreamin



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-10 16:06:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5592559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadodreamin/pseuds/avocadodreamin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being caught in an explosion, Matt suffers an injury that turns his world upside-down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. silence

The screaming girl was a trap.

Matt should have known. There was something off about her voice, something distant and echoey, but he was in fight or flight mode, and the scream gave him a reason to fight. Being Matt Murdock, he seized the opportunity with both fists. He slammed through the three guards on the door to the building easily enough. There were rumors, whispers around town that this place had been taken over by the remnants of Gao’s Chinese gang. It was probably that fact rattling around in the back of Matt’s mind that made him cautious and saved his life.

The scream was coming from the third floor. There were only half a dozen heartbeats between the doorway Matt burst through and the room the scream was coming from. There was a heartbeat there, elevated and scared, and he assumed that was her. The six people in between were hardly threats. Some were too old to be decent guards, some too young, and he could smell the sweat pouring off a particularly nervous guard just outside the room.

Something wasn’t _right_.

Matt ran up the stairs to the second floor. Three of the building’s occupants converged at the top of the stairs. They were all on the floor in fifteen seconds flat. The screaming was more persistent now, louder, but the breathing was off. It was too even, not panicked enough, and there was still that echoing sound that didn’t fit the room that Matt could sense above him. And there was something else...a scent, something he’d smelled before, something rare…

Matt swore and bolted into the room to his left. He jumped out the window towards the landing opposite.

The screaming stopped.

The building exploded.

The heat on Matt’s side was incredible. A second before Matt was thrown into the side of the brick building opposite the one he’d leapt from, there was an incredible pressure in his ears. Then there was nothing but pain, the taste of copper in his mouth, and darkness.

 

When Matt woke up, only pain remained.

He took a great, heaving breath, sitting up and flailing his arms. He felt his hand hit something, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, because he couldn’t hear the contact. No, not just the contact, he realized.

He couldn’t hear _anything_.

“I can’t hear,” he said, his mouth forming the words that reverberated in his skull. They were lost to him, gone into the vacuum around him. He reached out, up, and his hand met something again. This time the something reacted, wrapping itself around his hand. A person, someone was touching him, holding his hand, holding his shoulder down, pressing it against whatever was behind him. He was lying on something hard. He turned his head, listening for a voice, a heartbeat, trying to make out where he was. Pain shot down his left side and the world tilted queasily below him. No equilibrium. No echoes off the surfaces around him.

Nothing.

“I can’t hear!” he said again, his heart fluttering with fear and pain and panic. “I can’t hear anything!” The hand holding his got tighter, the one on his shoulder tapping him. He turned his face towards it, then back, searching. The hands on him were soft but strong, familiar but foreign. _Be calm_ , the Stick in his head said, but how, how could he be calm when the whole world was taken from him? There was nothing, nothing but darkness and silence and that burning, ripping pain that suddenly flared up from his skull to his toes. Then even that started to slip away from him, and he tried to cling to it, clenching his grip around the hand in his.

His hand slipped away as he lost consciousness.

 

Maybe Matt was in Hell.

The Devil would devise a Hell just like this for Matt, whose senses were so heightened after the accident. Constant pain and constant silence, nothing to give him a sense of where he was or what was happening. He could feel his arms moving through the air, smell the antiseptic sharpness over decay and death that meant _hospital_. For Matt Murdock, Hell would be a hospital.

“I can’t hear anything,” he shouted into the void. He didn’t know if anyone or anything was there to hear him. “Where am I? What’s happening? I can’t _hear_!” His chest tightened around the words, dissolving into a sob. He fell back onto something that was soft, too soft, and maybe this wasn’t Hell after all. Surely the Devil would prepare a bed of nails for Matt Murdock.

He felt the scream tear its way out of his chest.

The hands came soon after. Too many of them, on too many parts of Matt, on his head and his arms and his shoulders, and there were smells of people and disinfectant and latex. The hands pulled at him, pushed him, _hurt him_. He batted at them, punched out, reared his upper body away from the soft surface behind him. The world lurched and so did he, sideways maybe. The bile rose up in his throat and out through his mouth, the foul taste sharp, the smell of it making his stomach turn again. He coughed. He screamed.

If this wasn’t Hell, then Matt wanted to be dead.

Tears stung his eyes, made tracks down his cheeks. More hands fell on his arms and he shoved the sides of his hands out, hard enough to knock a man down. The hands came back, resting on the sides of his face. Matt felt the soft skin against one cheek, the other hand obscured by something. Something that scratched, blocking the sensation along his face. Something that ran all the way down his left side.

Bandages.

“I can’t hear,” he said once more, helplessly. Desperately. “What’s going on, who are you, where-” The hands on his face dropped away and another sob broke in Matt’s chest. He imagined the sound must be embarrassing, desperate and wild as he felt. His head spun until the soft hands met his, picking them up, gentle, kind. There was another smell fighting through the various atrocities of _hospital_. Something familiar and homely and kind of onion-y. His hands were guided in the direction that Matt thought was up.

They stopped at soft, damp skin.

 _Feel my face, Matty_ , he heard his dad’s voice say in his mind.

Matt took a shuddering breath and then let his fingers start to move. Eyelashes fluttered against the pads of his fingertips. There, in between them, there was a thin nose. Below that a mouth, with short, shallow breaths coming from between warm lips. The round cheeks were damp with tears. His fingers, moving quicker and harder now, felt their way outwards until they met hair that fell down to the person’s shoulders. Matt whimpered his name.

“Foggy.”

Arms wrapped themselves around Matt’s shoulders and reeled him in until his shoulder met Foggy’s chest. He turned slightly, dropping his hands to the space between them. Foggy’s hands (and it was so clear now, that they were Foggy’s, so familiar to Matt in size and shape) pressed against Matt’s back firmly. Matt brought his own fingers up to Foggy’s stomach, then crawled them around until they met at Foggy’s back, wrapped securely around Foggy’s waist. He turned his face against Foggy’s neck, letting the terrain of Foggy’s body be a map to the position of his own. He was on a bed. It gave way beneath him as Foggy shifted forwards, pulled Matt closer, tucking Matt’s head under his chin. Foggy was solid and warm beneath Matt’s hands and against his chest. He tightened his arms until he knew it couldn’t be comfortable, but Foggy only held him closer, running his hands up and down Matt’s back and shoulders, carefully avoiding the side that Matt could still feel burning. He could feel the vibrations of Foggy’s throat and chest against his head as Foggy talked. The breath expelled with each word ruffled through Matt’s hair. He couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear Foggy.

Matt cried against Foggy’s chest, soaking Foggy’s shirt front, until everything fell away again and he was drifting.


	2. ringing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt Murdock hates silence. And hospitals.

When Matt woke up again, the panic lasted less time. It was still dark and silent around him, but he could place Foggy at his side by smell. It had been a while since Foggy showered, and the smell of old fear and sweat was strong, but it was undeniably Foggy. After a quick check-up from the cool rubber hands of the nurse, Foggy slipped his hand into Matt’s, soft and warm. Matt clung to it.

“I need to know what’s happening. My ears...will I be deaf forever?” Matt’s mouth formed the words, his throat vibrated. He couldn’t hear a thing. He swallowed hard, and Foggy’s other hand rested on Matt’s arm reassuringly for a moment. Matt felt him shift slightly, and turned his head in Foggy’s direction. “Foggy? Can you ask the doctors what’s happening to me?”

Foggy patted his arm once, which Matt took to be a _yes_. 

“Is the doctor coming?” Matt asked.

Another tap. Another _yes_. Matt wanted to keep asking questions, keep getting answers, but he couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but couldn’t process his thoughts into speech. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes. Foggy moved a hand from his arm to his hair for a moment, then pulled away as a rush of air entered the room, wafting over Matt’s face. It smelled like urine and vomit and chemicals. Matt’s stomach rolled. Another man’s smell entered the room. More latex and chemicals, and underneath it all, the smell of old, dried blood that couldn’t be completely removed. This could be the doctor.

“Is the doctor here?” Matt asked urgently. Foggy’s hand went back to his arm, tapping once. “Ask him. Ask him if it’s permanent or temporary. Ask him- will I get my hearing back?” The words tumbled out of Matt’s mouth as he turned his head towards where he thought the doctor might be. Foggy squeezed Matt’s hand, running his thumb over Matt’s knuckles for a period of time that seemed to stretch on and on. Matt felt his throat constricting as he started to panic again. He tried to focus on the voices he could hear inside his mind. Stick telling him to _stop being a baby_. His dad saying _it’s okay, Matty, it’s okay_. Foggy saying _I got you, buddy_.

It didn’t work. Not when every voice was accompanied by the thought that he’d never hear someone’s voice again. His breath was coming too fast, wasn’t filling his lungs properly.

He felt it when Foggy noticed. Foggy turned quickly, sliding one hand up to Matt’s cheek without losing contact. The other hand went to Matt’s chest. Foggy rubbed Matt’s chest in circles, trying to calm his breathing. Matt let Foggy’s hand guide his head up and back so he could get the air in better, focused on the slow circles and tried to breathe in time with them.

“Is it forever?” he asked weakly. It was hard to get through the few words without taking a breath. No response. Foggy’s hand kept circling Matt’s chest, and Matt took that to mean he wasn’t calm enough to be understood yet. He kicked his brain into gear and _focused_ , letting the thoughts slide out of his head as he concentrated on the feel of Foggy’s hands.

After a few minutes, Foggy must have decided Matt had recovered enough, because he stopped moving the hand on Matt’s chest, pulled the other hand away from Matt’s face. Matt turned his head, chasing Foggy’s hand, and Foggy patted his chest gently. Matt called on the last of his patience to wait for Foggy to do whatever he needed. A minute later, something cool and smooth slid between the sheets and his damp, heavy fingers. It was paper. He ran his fingers over it until they hit resistance. Dots. The feel of lead pencil pooled into impressions on the paper. Foggy had drawn each dot individually with a pencil. He must have had to look up how to write braille for Matt. Tears filled Matt’s eyes as he ran his fingers over the word.

 _Temporary_.

Matt felt like he’d been drowning and now he was finally taking a breath. The air that filled his lungs was cold and clean and filled with promises of a future he didn’t think he’d have. He knew he was crying, and wished the doctor wasn’t still there to see it. It wasn’t so bad, though, because Foggy was there too, gripping Matt’s shoulder and hand. A gust of breath against his cheek told him Foggy had laughed.

Matt let himself laugh too.

 

The next two times Matt woke up, Foggy wasn’t there.

Karen was there, though. It took him a little longer to pick out her scent, to recognize the feel of her hand in his. She held it tightly, the cool fingers of her other hand stroking the back of his to help him through the painful, silent awakening. The moment he was breathing normally, Karen let him go. He frowned momentarily, confused, before the bed dipped next to him and Karen lowered her head to his good shoulder. Her hair was soft against his neck. It tickled his nose. He moved his hand to stroke it lightly as she wrapped an arm around his waist.

That was all they did the first time.

The second time, Karen came prepared. After the customary wake-up freak-out, Karen lifted his hand, palm up. She pressed something against it, bumpy and cylindrical, and it only took him a few moments to figure out it was his braille reader. It had a cord coming out of it, and Karen let him follow it with his fingers until it met a computer keyboard. He smiled slightly, and Karen patted his hand.

Trust Karen to find a way to communicate.

Once Matt had been assured, several times, that Foggy would be coming back, he was calm enough to talk to Karen about something else. They had a slow, awkward conversation about what Karen knew of what had happened. There was an explosion at a building near the docks, and Matt had been going to meet a client. Matt made a mental note to thank Foggy for the story when he came back. Claire too, maybe, depending on how much input she’d had. He’d put together enough to figure out that she’d found him first, must have changed him and gotten him to hospital somehow. 

Matt wondered if she was worried about him.

Karen, of course, wouldn’t know. Karen only knew that her friend was hurt, and her concern filled Matt’s senses. The taste of her tears left salt on his tongue as they evaporated, and the smell of fear pushed through her heavy perfume. When she touched Matt’s hand, he could feel the quick flutter of her pulse in her wrist. He missed her voice desperately.

Eventually, the conversation died down. It was too much, Matt asking a question without knowing if it could be understood, waiting for Karen to type out her reply, waiting to read it. There was nothing else to do, so Matt kept asking questions. _Is Foggy okay?_ Yes, apparently, and Karen was willing to type it often enough for Matt to remember. _When can I leave?_ Matt was too badly hurt. The burns on his side needed attention, not to mention the trauma to his ears.

He wanted to go home so badly it hurt.

If Matt could just get back to his apartment, he could meditate. Focus. Speed up the healing. But here he was monitored, anchored by the IV in his arm. Overwhelmed by the smell and taste of _hospital_ all around, people’s illness creeping into his pores. Helpless. Karen’s pity fell over him like a blanket, smothering. He loved her, he really did, but eventually he couldn’t take it anymore.

When he finally pretended to fall asleep, she pretended not to know.

 

The first words that passed Matt’s lips when he awoke and Foggy was there were _get me out of here_.

 

Before Foggy could convince the doctors to let Matt out of the hospital, his ears started ringing and everything went to shit. The ringing was worse than the silence.

When Matt first heard it, he nearly cried with relief. The sound of ringing was the first thing he’d heard in days, and for that alone it was a blessing. Matt thanked God, thanked Jesus, thanked every angel he could think of. He told Foggy about it and Foggy typed out _that’s great, dude, you’re like an old rock star_ , which made Matt laugh.

The laughter didn’t last long. The ringing was hell on his equilibrium, and as his ears recovered it got louder, more persistent. Matt sought stimulation to block it out, but every tiny movement made his head spin and his stomach roll. He vomited. The smell of vomit made him sicker. Foggy’s jokes got fewer, shorter, as the sickness ebbed and flowed, and Matt knew this was hard on Foggy.

“I’m sorry,” he said at one point. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this. I’m a mess, and I’m useless. This must be taking so much time away from work, from clients we should be helping...I’m just. I’m sorry.”

There was no response. Matt counted the seconds as they stretched out past a minute, waiting for a reply, but nothing came.

“Foggy?” he asked, the familiar salty smell of tears hitting his nose. It wasn’t strong, which probably meant Foggy was trying _not_ to cry, which seemed stupid when Matt had soaked through Foggy’s shirt just days before. Foggy _shouldn’t be crying at all_. “I’m-”

Foggy’s hands met Matt’s shoulders and pulled him up with ferocious affection. Matt’s stomach lurched and he groaned, but the nausea didn’t last long enough to make him puke, because a moment later he was engulfed in warmth. He was sitting up again, Foggy’s arms around him, one of Foggy’s hands pressing Matt’s head against his soft chest. He could feel Foggy’s heartbeat against his cheek. If he tried hard enough, he could imagine he was hearing it. He could believe, just for a minute, that his world wasn’t going to be like this forever. The thought made him grip Foggy’s arm convulsively, hard enough to bruise. Foggy just held him tighter, until Matt was completely enveloped in Foggy’s embrace and he could block out the God-forsaken ringing. Finally, when Matt felt like the lump in his throat had dislodged enough that he could breathe, he tapped Foggy’s shoulder.

“Okay. Enough,” he forced out, sliding out of Foggy’s grip. Foggy let him go, but the loss of touch made the ringing come back in full force. He groaned, and Foggy ran a hand through his hair. Once Matt was lying down again, Foggy slid the braille reader under his finger. Matt gripped it, tight enough to leave marks in his flesh, and waited.

 _When the ringing is better, we’re busting you out_ , Foggy typed. Matt let out a hiss of relief.

“How?” he asked, hoping his voice stayed quiet. He didn’t want a nurse or a doctor walking in on this conversation and asking Foggy too many questions.

 _Claire will help,_ Foggy typed. _She won’t let me dress up as a doctor. She won’t even let me borrow a stethoscope._

Matt huffed, an approximation of a laugh. “What do you want a stethoscope for?”

_Take it to the bar and get girls! Girls love doctors._

“Even doctors who steal equipment from hospitals?” Matt asked, raising an eyebrow. A whiff of air brushed the hairs of his arm, and he knew Foggy had laughed.

 _It would make me look impressive_ , Foggy typed. _They wouldn’t know I stole it. Dr. Nelson has a good ring to it, don’t you think?_

“Better than Franklin Nelson, Attorney? Nah,” Matt said. There’s another puff on his arm hair.

 _So you’re saying there’s no hope for me,_ Foggy typed. Matt snorted. He could feel his eyelids improbably drooping. The ringing had kept him awake for what felt like days. More letters appeared on his reader, and he dragged his fingers across them. _Go to sleep. It will be better when you wake up._

“Thanks, Foggy,” Matt slurred. It didn’t take much longer before he fell asleep.

 

When he woke up, Foggy was gone and Karen was back. The reader was still in Matt’s hand, and there was a word there that hadn’t been there before. _Always._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am medically incompetent. I did a little research before writing this chapter, but the medical stuff is probably garbage.


End file.
